There is this idea that to love everything is to assume the divine in all things. This requires knowing yourself enough to rest at the boundaries of self, knowing who you are in relation to God’s beloved world. This takes a new way of thinking, and as Friar Rohr has said, “we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” I am learning that this is an exercise in rhetoric. Both my roommate and I were reading different books by the same author, one I often bring up—cause he is the dude, and rhetoric-or even beyond to ethos and internal self-dentity of an individual/community-kept coming up. How we see, who we are, the directional front we align with—all have to do with an internal reality. And it is an alternative way. It is different, not out of rebellion, but out of faithfulness to the deepest fragments of our self-understanding.
All that to say, that as persons we have boundaries we yield to. I was working at one point, going to school and dating a woman and I remember telling my friend Matt that I wasn’t sure if I had the capacity to do all of this, well. I had run into a limit and realized I was a bordered person. It is humbling, being on the edge of self. When I was eighteen, hiking with this guy Tucker, we said at one point that we felt as if we could do whatever we wanted to to our bodies in a days walk without regretting it the next day. This was about the time we both started injuring ourselves. We learned our limitation, our circumference.
Our emotion capacities are easier to hide. They have internal borders and awareness that we can decorate with all sorts of fluff. We become blurry people, wanting it all then watching things fall, when we lay aside our internal self in an effort function on foreign terms. We assume a posture in this world that is not our own. It doesn’t belong to us and we don’t belong to it. Churches do this when they adopt a corporate way of seeing themselves and we do this as individuals when we love in order to belong instead of belonging to love. I know, rhetoric right? And if we live ourselves into new ways of thinking, well, I just thought my way into living technically.
But I can not dream of doing this living thing alone, of exploring new ways without the ripples of others. I have some adventures planned-and so do you; they are mundane, messy and run up to the borders of our being. They shake us, and so the world. And friends, I’m in the lobby of the Director’s Guild of America sitting on the floor as I write this. Guys are wearing suits, there are posters of famous people all around… but frankly, I don’t buy it. You my friends are a force featured by fidelity to love, loaded with newness and color, something pop cinema can’t touch and never could. Paint, please-with all the colors of love and the kind of passion that the rainbows can dance to. Live into this life, loving everything like the storms might kiss you back.
